AUSTIN (KXAN) — Heidi Williams’ love for birding grew from her father. “He always had bird feeders, and he was always very aware of them,” the assistant manager at Wild Birds Unlimited in South Austin said.
Finding birds on her property in Buda relied on bird feeders until recently. “I see mostly cardinals, tint mice, chickadees, several woodpeckers.”
Now, a new tool in her arsenal is helping her track the birds that don’t come to feed. It’s called Haikubox.
“If you’re a bird nerd, this is a great thing to get because it gives you a lot of information,” Williams said.
Listen to the birds
The small grey box is the brainchild of oceanographer David Mann. It uses rudimentary artificial intelligence to identify birds through sound alone, while also ignoring other sounds like human speech and traffic noise.
“It’s the same kind of neural network that’s used on your phone when it’s classifying images. And it says, ‘Oh, you want to see photos of days at the beach, or do you want to see, you know, photos of your dogs or cats or whatever,'” Mann said over Zoom.
With just a power source and WiFi, Haikubox taps into a database out of Cornell University. It also contains around 100 common birds stored on the device.
“It can tell people, you know, what birds are coming through, how their behaviors are changing throughout the year,” Mann said.
Naturalists and researchers
The box, named one of Time Magazine’s inventions of the year for 2024, is meant for bird lovers and scientists. Mann said they wrote a research paper using the device’s observations during the April 8 eclipse.
The behavior of the birds during the eclipse was directly observed by Williams at her Buda home.
“When the Eclipse was actually happening you could see that there were absolutely no birds (songs). And then almost immediately, as the Eclipse uncovered, you could see the bird song coming back,” Williams said.
Williams shares her device’s reports with her friends and co-workers. Each device broadcasts its reports over WiFi to a Haikubox app so that neighbors can know what birds are in the area. This broadcast can be set to private mode if people don’t want to share their data.
Williams said that the Haikubox has detected unusual birds beyond what she typically sees. Over several nights recently, it detected a wild turkey in the fields behind her home.
Two people at Wild Birds Unlimited have the device currently. It is expensive. The device with a five-year subscription costs $399, while a Haikubox with just a one-year subscription costs $249.
Williams said she loves chatting with customers about the device and said it gives her something to connect with her fellow birders.
“It kind of gives you a better conversation than what are you seeing at your feeders.”